By bionitech on

Is it possible to downgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 6, without having to manually transfer all content (cut and paste), and without running into problems with the differences in naming conventions for database variables?

Comments

stefjazzinho’s picture

stefjazzinho commented

D7 is really not ready...

charlie-s’s picture

charlie-s commented

There is no downgrade path and no modules or techniques that I have seen or heard of to do this "easily".

Does your D7 site really have a lot of content? Why are you needing to downgrade?

stefjazzinho’s picture

stefjazzinho commented

My site does not yet have a lot of content, but I plan to have a lot. I want to get back to D6 because I am a newby and I need simple and stable clean URLs and SEO tools now. I have spent far too much time fiddling with D7 and I need a robust and simple platform. There virtually no SEO tool on D7 which is essential to me.

Stef

charlie-s’s picture

charlie-s commented

Install Drupal 6 on your server and migrate the little bit of content you have to it using Node Export or a similar module.

mbeenon’s picture

mbeenon commented

I am having an issue with downgrading. I have no problem doing it the long way, but I really need to know how to migrate the user accounts! Or find out the stored value of their password they used, then manually create their account on the D6. Any body know how?

mbeenon’s picture

mbeenon commented

Turns out the passwords are incrypted as a var32 in D6, and a var128 in D7. Now I need to know how to convert each to readable text from var128, and then convert it into the var32 standard.

charlie-s’s picture

charlie-s commented

I do not think you're going to be able to decrypt the passwords from D7.

At this point, you're still not wanting to use D7?

jscoble’s picture

jscoble commented

I would agree, the encryption algorithm is a 1 way algorithm. You wouldn't be able to decrypt them in D6 either. D6 uses a simple md5 operation on passwords while D7 hashes it first then encrypts, iirc. The only way I can think of of discovering the password is using a rainbow table that was generated via D7's password encryption function. But that'd be impractical given the size of the resulting dataset and the fact that it would take decades or centuries to generate such a table given the resources available to the average person.

You'd probably have to just transfer over the D7 passwords with the user migration, let all your users know that they'll have to reset their password before they can log in again and rely on Drupal's built in password change functionality to handle the users changing their password.

charlie-s’s picture

charlie-s commented

100% correct.

I can't stress this enough -- at this point in D7 development, I would be pretty hard pressed to downgrade a relatively young site to D6.

AmericasThirdParty’s picture

AmericasThirdParty commented

Although D7 is very cool (love the admin section). I am downgrading because of lack of contributed modules to D7. Anyhow, I had to create a new database when I did downgrade (basically a clean D6 install). I'm not sure how to get my info from the old database to the new one. I am a newb with MySQL. I'll check out the module mentioned previously to see if it helps.